Pain and Rehabilitation in Patients with Spinal Cord Injury

抄録

When patients with chronic spinal cord injuries have pain as an accessory symptom, ADL training is delayed, and it is often difficult to take measures to cope with this situation. There have been very few reports on pain experienced by patients with spinal cord injuries in the world literature to date, and medical science today still does not know how to treat patients with spinal cord injuries accompanied by pain systematically. Against this background, to clarify the actual state of pain in chronic spinal cord injury patients, we investigated the severity of impairment due to the pain and patients' independence when they underwent rehabilitation training. 1) Out of patients with chronic spinal cord injuries, 43 that had pain (incidence, 51.2%) were enrolled in this study. 2) Many patients in the vertebral fused group had pain in the back, and the pain was likely to disappear following removal of internal fixation. 3) Pain in the non-surgery group frequently occurred in a sensory extinction area and was intractable. 4) The period until independence in ADL was achieved was 5.6 ± 1.71 months for the complete paraplegia group with no pain, 7.5 ± 3.34 months for the group with disappearance of previous tentative pain, and 11.6 ± 4.89 months for the group with remaining pain. These findings indicate that pain associated with spinal cord injury is a factor that interferes with rehabilitation.